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From: R. Nachmani
Subject: Self-attestation
Date: 7 Kislev 5781
I had the same reaction when the specification was first proposed. In my community, we relied on who vouched for whom. If a stranger came to Baghdad claiming to be Jewish, someone would ask: who knows you? Where did you pray before? Who was your teacher? The answers did not prove anything, but they established a chain. You could follow the chain back, link by link, until you reached someone the community trusted.
But consider: how would you verify in a system like ours? The Chief Rabbinate claims authority over Jewish status in Israel. The Conservative movement claims its own authority. Reform accepts patrilineal descent; Orthodox does not. A Jew from my community might be accepted by one authority and rejected by another.
Any verification would require choosing which authority to trust. The specification avoids that choice by not verifying at all. I am not sure this is a solution, but I understand why we arrived here.
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